The Once and Future Gowanus

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From 2004 to 2012, housing prices in Gowanus rose 52 percent despite the presence of the polluted Gowanus Canal. Townhouse prices there are still lower than in other parts of gentrifying Brooklyn.CreditMichael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

By a recent and not remotely exacting tally, the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn has at least eight community groups dedicated to its planning and self-analysis: the Gowanus Alliance, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, Bridging Gowanus, the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group, the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, Save Gowanus and the Gowanus Ecology Initiative. This does not include the block associations and housing groups that have an interest in the area, nor does it take full measure of the conferencing that Gowanus has inspired. Four years ago, after the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site, a summit called Reconsidering Gowanus was held. Last month, Gowanus was the subject of its own TEDx talks.

Many neighborhoods in New York City can lay claim to containing distinct and competing interests, but Gowanus is perhaps in a category of its own, home both to the $38 salted caramel pie and something called God’s Only Demons Motorcycle Club, a members-only bikers confederacy targeted by the city this month for closing, for various obstructions of civility. “You drive by a door that says God’s Only Demons and you’d think there’s child porn and heroin going on inside, but it’s not that,” Justin Walters, who owns a local motorcycle storage business, told DNAinfo, speculating that complaints from residents of new apartment buildings nearby had surely instigated the city’s reproach.

Gowanus has become the most obvious touchstone for fears surrounding the rapid evolution that has overwhelmed so much of Brooklyn in recent years. It is also a test case for how democratically an area once colonized by industry might evolve into something like a modern Jane Jacobs vision. Dumbo is both a point of reference here and in one view, the representation of a nightmare outcome, given the area’s distinction as a nexus of multimillion-dollar lofts and budding tech empires. But Dumbo came of age very differently, the vision of one singular developer, David Walentas, who owned so many of the old factory and warehouse buildings that were converted.

In many ways, Gowanus, more than any other gentrifying area of the city, seems poised to exist as a kind of urban utopia, and I say this in spite of the recent opening of Royal Palms, a shuffleboard parlor offering Floridian theme drinks. Dumbo is where Etsy maintains its corporate headquarters; Gowanus is where the kind of things sold on Etsy are made. Potters, furniture makers and refinishers have opened studios. At Gowanus Furniture, there are classes that teach people how to make their own cutting boards. Diaper Kind, started by two young women five years ago, is a cloth-diaper service that makes deliveries throughout the city. Of course, to those suffering from Brooklyn fatigue, this is all just invitation to parody, but would anyone prefer a Nike store instead?

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A rendering depicts an architect’s concept for a system in the Gowanus area that would incorporate cisterns and vegetation to prevent dirty water from entering the city’s waterways.Credit2014 Atema Architecture/FLOW Collaborative

Small, quaint businesses in Gowanus have a devoted advocate in a man named Paul Basile. Mr. Basile runs a real estate and construction concern in Gowanus called Salvatore Basile II Inc., started by his father, a Sicilian immigrant who in the early 1960s worked at the Goya food plant in the area. As president of the Gowanus Alliance, Mr. Basile has a vision: to start, maintain and expand businesses to preserve and create jobs. He does not disdain hipsterish enterprise. His worry is that the neighborhood will tilt precariously toward the residential; he is also concerned about homeowners coming in, capitalizing on industrial chic and then evincing irritation about what it actually means to live in proximity to industry.

“People are coming in and paying a million dollars for a house between two factories and complaining,” Mr. Basile said. “We need the city to send the message that if you’re living next to a factory, you have to deal with it. We’re not the factories of yesteryear who polluted the canal.”

On the other side of the discussion are affordable housing advocates who, of course, want more housing. But there, too, at least relative progress has been made. The Lightstone Group is building a canalside development that will have not condominiums but rental apartments, 20 percent of which will be made available to low-income tenants (for instance, a family of four making $49,800). Affordable units will be fully integrated with market-rate apartments, a step other developers are often reluctant to take.

The environmental remediation that the canal will require has paradoxically elevated Gowanus as a hope for idyllic sustainability. At the TEDx conference last month, the architect Ate Atema and Susannah Drake, a Brooklyn landscape architect, each offered inspiring visions for creating environmentally efficient mechanisms to deal with water and sewage overflow that further pollute the canal. Ms. Drake’s plan would create a soft-scape urban space to absorb and filter surface-water runoff. Mr. Atema’s plan, called Street Creeks, would create a series of covered curbside channels that, in conjunction with cisterns and vegetation, would collect and clean water before it enters the city’s waterways.

From 2004 to 2012, according to the website Property Shark, housing prices in Gowanus rose 52 percent, but townhouse prices remain considerably cheaper than in the surrounding neighborhoods of Park Slope, Cobble Hill and environs. It is possible to make less than the sum at which Bill de Blasio would tax you to fund universal prekindergarten and still live in Gowanus. Of course, it could be that in five years, we will open Women’s Wear Daily to discover that Marc Jacobs has bought up all of Butler Street, and that where God’s Only Demons once stood — oh, those were the days! — $8,000 handbags reign. The detractors who protested the arrival of Whole Foods in December believe, after all, that Satan has already come.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, the Big City column in some editions last Sunday, about the evolution of the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, misstated the name of a website that reported on the God’s Only Demons Motorcycle Club. It is DNAinfo.com.